Taste of Downtown

Small Plates Make a Big Difference

The Little Apple Optimists Club is an organization that supports kids in the Manhattan community through local service projects. For years they've hosted fundraising events to get community members involved and raise funds for kids programming. However, they had started feeling some growing pains with their fundraising events. They sold tickets to their events in person - with only cash or check - which limited them both on time and manpower to actually sell and collect money. They needed a fresh and efficient way to run their fundraising events if they wanted to continue growing.

Our approach? Go big. We pitched a brand new fundraising event - Taste of Downtown - and handled all aspects of the event through online channels: advertising, ticket sales and customer service.

After a few weeks of online promotion and word-of-mouth excitement, Taste of Downtown sold out in just 72 hours of making ticket sales live - a result that normally took the Optimists weeks of effort. All in all, $12,000 was raised that first year.

The event is now 4 years strong and over $50,000 has been raised for the Manhattan community.